Come Back for Me, and I Come Back for You
by lun27
Summary: Draco never wanted this, but something kept pulling him back to her. A series of unwanted time jumps, forces him to meet a young Hermione Granger again and again until one day he meets her in his own time.


**This story was written for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition**

 **FINALS ROUND 1**

 **Wimbourne Wasps - BEATER 2**

 **Time Travel: The Time Traveller's Wife**

Optional Prompts:

[emotion] Disgust

[quote] 'Life is a series of embarrassing moments which leave you feeling alone in your confusion and shame.' — Miranda Hart

 _Word Count: 2984_

* * *

The first time it happened, he had just poured himself a Firewhiskey. It had been a long day for Draco as he had finally sold the last of his father's fishy sub-companies in order to clean his record in hours of negotiation with a Hungarian businessman.

Suddenly, he felt his skin prickle.

At first Draco assumed that his tired mind was playing tricks on him, but then he realized that something really wasn't right.

He felt a pull, similar to apparition, but it was slower and somewhat painful. He found himself unable to move and helplessly watched the world dissolve around him, clinging to his crystal tumbler until he was lost in complete darkness.

The dizziness faded, the ground felt stable again, but Draco could barely see a thing.

Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he was shocked to discover that he wasn't in his study any longer, but in the room of a child, judging by the decorations. The air smelled like freshly washed linen, and there were hand-drawn pictures on the walls; everything in the room screamed of childhood.

But it looked outlandish — there were no magical mobiles, no animated plushies. Everything was motionless, even the eyes of the little girl staring at him from the bed weren't moving.

"Who are you, Mister?" she asked meekly and Draco did a double-take. It was dark, only little light was shining through a gap in the curtains, but he was certain that the girl in front of him was none other than a very young Hermione Granger.

Oh bloody hell, he thought and took a swig from his Firewhiskey. Now he understood why everything seemed terribly odd and off-kilter in this room. It was a Muggle bedroom, he realised with disgust. He didn't understand, however, what had brought him here.

"What am I doing here?" he asked irritated, ignoring her question.

Her eyes grew big. "Are you here to punish me? Mummy said I did bad things today, that there won't be presents for Christmas because Santa is mad. Are you Santa? You don't look like Santa..." little Granger trailed off. Then she suddenly broke into tears. "I didn't mean to knock over the Christmas tree, I'm s-sorry!" She hiccuped.

Draco groaned. Whatever this was, it was obviously designed to mock his sanity. Briefly, he wondered if something had been in his Firewhiskey, but he had only drunk it after he had appeared in this room.

"Merlin, stop crying, Granger," he snapped. "There is no Santa or whatever."

She immediately stopped, quietly wiping her tears. "I suspected so much," she said after a while.

She looked at him and something in his chest seemed to ease, like a coil that had previously constricted his breathing. At the same time, he felt his skin prickle again and the darkness of the bedroom bleeded into a swirl of muted light until he found himself back in his study.

He drank the whole bottle of Firewhiskey that night and when he swallowed a potion against his massive headache in the morning, he was convinced that it had just been a bad dream.

* * *

The second time it happened, Draco was on the way to meet his lawyer to go through his plans of expanding the family business to Asia. He stopped at Fortescue's to get his favourite ice-cream, when his fingers started tingling just as he was about to search his pockets for a few sickles.

He felt himself being pulled out from the crowd and sucked into nothingness.

It was Granger again, sitting in an empty classroom. She was alone; outside he could see other kids playing. This time, Granger wasn't crying, but when she gazed up at him, she looked like a bird with broken wings.

"I mustn't go out," she explained, not even bothering to see if he cared. "I made all of Jimmy's hair fall out." She said it as a matter of fact, not questioning her accidental magic. Draco remembered how he had once turned his father bald when he had been very, very little. Children tended to go for the hair with their uncontrollable bouts of magic.

He marvelled how she didn't even flinch at his sudden presence, neither was she afraid. Instead, she eyed his ice-cream, poorly hiding the obvious plea to share.

Draco sneered, he'd rather teach the giant squid salsa than offering.

Sighing, he waited to be transported back like last time. This mess was causing him a major headache. He felt the pull when the bell rang and Granger excitedly took out her books. Always overly eager, he observed.

Finding himself back in the line in front of Fortescue's, Draco was in the embarrassing situation of having to explain why he had disapparated before paying.

* * *

Draco nearly lost balance when he got lost in a swirl of colours the next time. The pull threatened to tear him apart and he squeezed his eyes shut, desperate to have it end.

"Oh, it's you again."

He opened his eyes, finding himself on a deserted Muggle playground. There was drizzle irritating his eyes. He squinted down at the lone girl sitting in the sandbox. She was always alone, he noted. Granger had aged a few years since the first time he had unwillingly visited her childhood.

Her hands were covered in wet sand. Draco sneered in disgust. She was just where she belonged: in the dirt. She looked miserable, her bushy hair laced with raindrops, making it cling to her splotched cheeks.

"Are you my secret friend? Do all magical children get secret friends? Professor McGonagall didn't tell me all the details yet, you have to know. She said I'll learn everything soon enough at Hogwarts. But I want to know now!" Merlin, she really was a talker.

He laughed at her, sitting in front of him in the sandbox looking like a wet poodle. "I'm no friend of yours, Granger."

Her gaze flickered downwards and she wiped at the raindrops on her face. Except they were no raindrops.

"Bloody hell, how much crying can a child do?"

"I'm not crying," she claimed, despite the obvious tracks of tears on her cheeks. She turned her nose up at him until he disappeared, frowning.

Since then, Draco got paranoid, constantly waiting for the pull to drag him back in time again.

* * *

One day — he was in the Ministry to get approval for a trade deal — Draco felt the pull that would take him back to another moment in Granger's life.

She was considerably older, standing in a Muggle street, somewhere in a Muggle neighbourhood, looking at a Muggle house. There was melancholy about her. Something incredibly sad.

The windows of the house were dead and there was a sign in the yard offering it for sale.

Then she noticed him and her stance hardened. "I remember you." Her voice was hoarse, pained.

Draco's heart ached; he wanted to grip at his chest to soothe the pain, but he resisted the reflex, remained stoic.

"I punched you last year, do you remember?"

He sneered. So she had recognised him. He might have grown up, but the Malfoy traits were hardly difficult to miss. It must be the end of their fourth year for her, he realised. The Dark Lord had just returned.

Draco shuddered at the thought.

"Why do you haunt me, Malfoy? Are you dead in your time?"

"Fuck you, Granger."

She scoffed. "That's your worst? Get lost, I want to be alone."

She left him there in front of the house without looking back. She practically ran from him.

Draco waited for the pull, waited for being taken back. Nothing happened. He felt intensely lonely in the Muggle neighbourhood. It didn't feel like an emotion he had felt before, it felt foreign.

He looked back at the house. The sign at the doorbell had the name Granger on it. But why had her family left, he wondered.

Finally, Draco felt the pull and exhaled relieved when he was back in his time.

He needed to find her, needed to make her stop. He wanted his life back without the constant fear of being pulled out of his time at the most inconvenient moments. Draco couldn't sleep, ate quickly, had a hard time concentrating on his paperwork. He cancelled all appointments. He was too worried that he might disappear in the middle of a meeting.

His life had turned into a series of embarrassing moments that left him feeling alone in confusion and shame.

Even the Prophet noticed that something wasn't right with him and reported about his continued absence from the public. He felt the urge to sue them for invading his private life.

* * *

The next time, he had just put on socks. His shirt was only halfway buttoned up and his eyes still weary from too little sleep.

The place he was pulled to was deadly cold. His wand had remained behind on his nightstand, back in the time he actually belonged.

He would die this time, Draco thought. He'd surely die from cold. He was in the middle of nowhere – a bloody forest in the bloody middle of winter

"I'll find you Granger. I'll find you and kill you for doing this to me," he growled as he saw her stepping out of a tent.

She looked surprised, but then eyed him calmly. Flicking her wand, she turned his shirt into a winter coat, and he quickly pulled it closed. Draco's feet already felt dead when she turned his soddy socks into shoes.

Her eyes looked tired, he noted. And red. She had been crying.

"At least you look as miserable as I feel at the moment," he growled, burying his nose in the coat's neck.

She sniffed and turned her head, looking away over the tent into the distance between the trees.

"Ron's left us," she said, quietly.

His eyes focused on her, surprised. "As if I care." His comeback came much too late and with too little bite.

She noticed and smiled weakly.

"So you're going to hunt me down when you go back to where you came from?" She looked curious, an all too familiar expression in her eyes that was only dulled by tiredness and wariness.

"That means I'm still alive. Did we win?"

There was a fragile vulnerability in her voice, a hope so delicate that it threatened to shatter in the bone-chilling cold.

Draco realised that she didn't know — that she had no sense of the future he was coming from.

He shrugged dismissively, unsure if it was his place to tell, or if he would endanger the outcome of things if he revealed too much. She definitely wasn't worth it, her miserability didn't bother him enough to relieve her of it.

Her gaze didn't break from his. "Well, I assume as you are not gloating about the neverending power of Vol- of You-Know-Who... I suppose that's a good sign."

Draco wondered how miserable her life must be to draw hope from something so hypothetical. He wasn't left to wonder for long, though, as he felt the pull and saw her silhouette dissolving into the icy white of the winter landscape.

The moment, he felt the dizziness recede, he pulled the clothes she had transfigured off. He was still trembling like a leaf and wasted no time filling his tub to the brim with hot water.

As he felt his muscles thwaning and relaxing, he couldn't help but wonder how she beared with the constant cold. He doubted that the shabby tent she had stepped out from had a bathroom with a tub or even built in heating spells.

* * *

He had sworn that he would find Granger and punish her for what she had done to him, because — clearly — it was her fault that he had to go through this misery. When Draco started looking for her, thought, he was surprised that every trace of her in the British Wizarding World was gone. It was as if she didn't exist anymore. As if she never had.

He panicked, thinking that maybe his time-jumping had influenced the present and had somehow caused her to die sometime during the war.

Suddenly, he desperately wished to be transported back again. What if indeed something would happen to her? It would be his fault for coming back, it would be the consequence of his presence in a time and place where he should have never been.

He couldn't help but picture her lying in the school yard that had turned into a battleground, her body broken and her eyes dead, and it chilled his very heart, made his breathing difficult and erratic.

Only later, when he was deeply buried in the archives of the Daily Prophet to find any trace of her post-war life, did Draco realize how irrational his worry was, how out of character. What did he care about the Mudblood? It should be a relief to assume her to be dead. It would mean no more time jumps for him, hopefully.

Draco nodded to himself — that was a good prospect, he'd go with that and try to live his life again.

When he swished his wand to send the papers back to their shelves, his eye caught an article with a picture of her on top.

He bent over it, squinting his eyes at the yellowed pages. She had gone abroad apparently, had taken a teaching offer in France. Right after the war, after the burials had been over.

Granger had run, he realised. From what he wasn't sure. From the trauma? From the reporters hungry for stories about their war heroes? From him?

Whatever it was, she was a bloody coward, Draco decided.

* * *

He waited for it to happen again. Waited days, weeks and when three months had passed, he felt relief as well as a gnawing sense of loneliness. He couldn't help thinking about her hiding somewhere in France.

* * *

Draco hated it, all of it, but he had to keep face, smile politely at the Minister and nod his agreement over political views when he couldn't care less. The annual victory ball was a farce in his opinion, but not attending amounted to siding with the Dark Lord once again in the eye of the public.

Usually, he used the ball for building relationships and position himself within the political narrative as the successfully reformed Death Eater, but for some reason, after years of absence, she had decided to come back to attend the victory ball probably for her first time.

The only way Draco knew to deal with seeing her again was getting drunk on cheap champagne as quickly as possible while keeping as far away as possible.

When it got late and the air stuffy, Draco decided to catch a breath outside on the patio. He was pretty pissed by that time and — of bloody course — Granger had decided to breathe fresh air at the same time.

She stood with her back turned to him.

He'd regret talking to her in the morning, he knew it, but the alcohol made his tongue move faster than his brain could stop it.

"Why did you come back?"

Granger turned, looking at him as if she had been waiting for that question for the entire evening. He wanted to be angry at her so badly for causing him so much misery, but his scowl looked half-hearted and he knew it.

"Malfoy," she acknowledged him. "I was curious. I saw a picture of you in the Prophet, claiming you had vanished from the public…" She hesitated and looked off to the side, avoiding his eyes. "I realised that you looked like I remembered you, that it must have happened around this time."

He scoffed. "You abandoned everyone but came back to see what happened to me just because some rag couldn't find more interesting stories to report about than my private life?"

She turned further away in the fashion she had when they had stood before each other in the winter forest.

"I couldn't bear it. The attention, the burials, the guilt. When Madame Maxime offered, I took the opportunity to get away from it all. I was worried when you'd come to strangle me to death, too." She laughed a sad little laugh. "I didn't realize it would be so long until you'd come back for me."

He wanted to interrupt her, to tell her that he had not come back for her, that she was delusional, but she continued.

"France wasn't far enough apparently, there were still familiar faces. The Weasleys visited often because of Bill and Fleur. So I went to Mahoutokoro."

"Japan?"

She nodded. "It's beautiful. It's heavenly isolated. But I couldn't keep myself from reading the news here in Britain. It was a stupid obsession. I was wondering when it would happen, when you would… you know." She trailed off. "I even did research."

Of bloody course she had. "So?" he asked.

"Have you ever heard of Karma?" She smiled when he eyed her sceptically. "You caused me so much misery when we were young, I guess magic has found a way to make you pay back."

He scoffed, Karma — the Japanese had clearly muddled Granger's mind, next thing she'd start making prophecies like Trelawney. "And what are you going to do now?" he asked. "Are you going back to Japan?"

"Are you going to kill me?" She laughed. He couldn't help but compare how content she looked now to how awful she had been when he had last seen her in the winter forest. It warmed something in him. The feeling was unwanted, but not completely unpleasant.

"I'll think about it," he shot back with a smirk and she laughed again. The sound tickled the skin at the nape of his neck. Not unpleasant either.

* * *

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